Bit Torrent Speed Questions

[SpocksBrainOnDrugs]

Can someone suggest and up to date tutorial for setting up bit torrent? I
recently did some googling and setup port forwarding on my router and seemed
to solve NAT problems. I've got a 6 mb down cable connection and feel I
should be able to do even better than what I'm getting (anywhere from 20 -
120 kbs, with an average around 40, which is 2-3 times what I was getting
before tweaking). My client is ABC 3.1, downloading torrents show up in
green. These are some questions I'm still trying to figure out:

1) I have just one port forwarded with my D-Link 604 router. Should I
forward more ports? If so how many? I don't see a setting in ABC to specify
these ports, but I think I read somewhere that it will automatically look
for ports sequentially after the one I specify, is that true?

2) What is the max number of torrents I should be downloading at once?

3) If I use a program like Hide IP Platinum to go through a proxy server,
will that affect my speeds? (I can't tell that it does so far.)

4) Should all settings in ABC be default? What about setting a max upload
speed? Currently I set it to 25 as a guess.

5) Should I be using a different (better/faster) client?

6) I changed my network settings from automatic to specifying IP, Subnet,
and gateway. I'm not sure what to do about DNS server. Tutorial said to
contact my ISP (comcast) to get this, but they would not give me anything
and said to set to automatic. Since they said that specifying a number would
not be able to connect to net (which isn't true), I don't think they will be
of any help. I've tried using the DNS showing when I do an ipconfig in dos
and it works fine. Currently I'm using some numbers I found in a tutorial,
but I can't really see any speed difference. Does DNS address have any
affect on my bit torrent download speeds?

7) Does PeerGaurdian 2 affect my speeds?

8) I don't use the default port of 6881 in ABC and for forwarding. Is there
any pros/cons to using any particular number in the 10000-50000 range?


Thanks!

[Auggie2k]

Try browsing the forums a bit more before making a thread, we get this question a lot.

Anyway, to help you, go to this thread here and download the PDF, DOC or TXT. It will help out everything for you.

http://www.zeropaid.com/bbs/showthread.php?t=33125